SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 26,
2001 -
Experts in text, internationalization, and Internet software will come to WashingtonD.C. on Jan. 28-31, for the 20th
International Unicode Conference, to discuss the latest advances in their
fields.

Recent developments in the World
Wide Web will be covered in depth, including such topics as Security, XML
Query, XML XForms, and Internet Domain Names. Panel
sessions include experts from the World Wide Web consortium.

Neophytes to internationalization
will also benefit from the many tutorials, sessions, and panels addressing the
latest on distributed computing, HTML, XML, CSS, .NET, Java, C++ and C#.

This conference will address how
major products rely on Unicode, including the newest releases of Microsoft
Windows XP, IBM ICU, Microsoft Office, the .Net Framework, Oracle 9i, and
others. Program details can be found at: http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc20.

Highlights of the conference
include 2 keynote speakers, Tim Bray and Mohamed Muhsin:

Tim Bray is a co-inventor of XML
(Extensible Markup Language) and founder and Chief Executive Officer of
Antarcti.ca. Tim is widely recognized as an expert in Web architecture, information
retrieval, and software optimization. In 1994 he introduced what would become
one of the first commercial web Search Engines. In 1996, he joined the World
Wide Web Consortium's XML Working Group, serving as co-editor of the Extensible
Markup Language (XML 1.0) specification.

Mohamed Muhsin
is Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the World Bank, one of the
world's largest sources of development assistance. It works in more than 100
developing economies with the primary focus of helping the poorest people and
the poorest countries. Mr. Muhsin is the Bank's
senior spokesperson on information and technology management, including global
telecommunications, videoconferencing, information management, and enterprise
business systems. (http://www.worldbank.org)

Conference attendees will learn
about the latest features of version 3.1 of the Unicode Standard, released
earlier this year. The highlight of the new release is the addition of 44,946
new encoded characters, including over 40,000 new ideographs for Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean. This makes a grand total of 94,140 encoded characters in
Unicode 3.1.

During Jan. 30-31, attendees can
also view the latest products supporting Unicode demonstrated by exhibitors in
the Conference Showcase.

The Unicode Standard has become the
foundation for all modern text processing.It is used on mainframes, PCs, portable devices, and for distributed
processing across the Internet. The standard brings dramatic cost reductions to
applications and enables the exchange of text in languages all over the world.

The conference is held every year
in Silicon
Valley in
September, with additional conferences held at other locations around the
world. The complete program and speaker biographies -- and registration
information

The following companies and organisations are sponsoring the conference:

Agfa/Monotype Corporation

Basis Technology Corporation

Microsoft Corporation

Netscape Communications

Oracle Corporation

Progress Software Corporation

Reuters Ltd.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM

The Unicode Consortium was founded
as a non-profit organization in 1991. It is dedicated to the development,
maintenance and promotion of The Unicode Standard, a worldwide character
encoding.The Unicode Standard encodes
the characters of the world's principal scripts and languages, and is code-for-code
identical to the international standard ISO/IEC 10646.In addition to cooperating with ISO on the
future development of ISO/IEC 10646, the Consortium is responsible for
providing character properties and algorithms for use in implementations.

The membership base of the Unicode
Consortium includes major computer corporations, governments, software
producers, database vendors, research institutions, international agencies and
various user groups: